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What I Learned From The First 10 Guests On The Esports Narrative

As I’m reading through the show notes for my first 10 episodes of The Esports Narrative I am noticing some trends, some common themes, across all of my guests. In this article I am going to share those themes with you, those lessons learned. I hope that you find value in this and are able to pick up on some little nuance that I am trying to communicate and I help that it helps you in your life or your career.

Lesson #1: know yourself above all else

In a world where there is so much opportunity and there is so many distractions pulling at your from every angle, it’s so so so important that you know yourself. You have to know what your innate talents are. What are you really just naturally good at? What are you bad at? Do you suck at spelling or are you a spelling bee champion? Do you just naturally have amazing athleticism or maybe you can’t even hit a layup uncontested. You have to figure out what you are good at and what you suck at. Before doing anything else, just figure that out. Once you know those two things you can begin engineering your life around those talents, skills and abilities.

The second part to this is knowing your passion. What is it that you want to be doing every day all day? I encourage you to look deep within yourself and really try to determine what that is. If you’re not sure, then pick something you’re passionate about and try it for a month, 3 months, 6 months. If you love it you will know and if not you will know. The only way to know what you’re passionate about is to taste it. You can’t search on google and watch youtube videos or listen to the 3 step process for finding your passion. You just have to try and experience and taste and figure it out.

Lesson #2: learn how to communicate…effectively

The second lesson I have learned from all of my guests is that you MUST learn to communicate and communicate effectively. Everyone can communicate and relay their thoughts and opinions. The key is to be able to communicate in an effective way. What that means is that what you are saying to someone is having some kind of affect or its causing some sort of response from them in a desirable way. For example. Say you’re a coach of a counter-strike team and they just lost a match. You saw some really glaring issues that you think the team needs to work on. How you communicate these weaknesses to your team is vital to you sticking around for one and two providing the team with the information they need to improve. You have to find a way to communicate clearly, concisely and without condescension in this case. Being able to convey your point and drive some sort of result is very important and it’s a skill that’s important not only for esports, but for life. Without good communication you have nothing.

Lesson #3: get to know other people in your industry

The last lesson I learned from my first 10 guests on The Esports Narrative is that you have to devote time to getting to know people in your industry. The guests on my show have recommended a number of things to achieve this but the top recommendations are to a) use Twitter to interact with people you’re interested in and b) go to events. When you interact on twitter, try to create meaningful relationships. Try to be add value to the conversation. You can do this in a number of ways. You can educate, entertain or inform. Each situation is different so you just have to evaluate it on a case by case basis. I am always trying to engage with the community. Whether it’s commenting with a funny meme or add some sort of real opinion or perspective on a topic I am always trying to connect in a meaningful way. If I ever meet the people i’m interacting with online, in person, I want to be the same person. I don’t want to fake who I am on twitter only to be 180 degrees different in person. This is modern day networking. Before social media you had to leave your house and go to conferences and meetups and chamber of commerce meetings. While those are all very valuable things, you don’t have to rely solely on them to network anymore. So just remember, add value to your conversations. Focus on what the other person gets out of it and you will be able to create meaningful relationships and your networking will pay off.

Thank you for reading. I hope you got value from this. If you did get some tips from this I would really appreciate it and it would mean the world to me if you would tag 3,4,5,6 friends or share this post with them. It would mean so much to me that you share it. Thank you!